Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Syria as "willing to fight to the last Egyptian"

"The [Syrian] shelling of Israeli settlements escalated meanwhile, reaching various levels of lethality throughout the [second] day. Rabin was not impressed with the display, dismissing it as an attempt to refute the allegation, already gaining currency in the Arab world, that 'Syria is willing to fight to the last Egyptian.'" Michael B. Oren, Six days of war: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 231. Not anxious to open up a third front, the Israelis, and most notably Dayan, had been studiously ignoring Syrian activity.